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| The Daily Examiner, 29 May 2019 |
The Daily Examiner, 29 May 2019, p.5:
A location in Maclean
once synonymous with exclusion of indigenous people from the town’s business
district has been turned into a symbol of inclusion.
The site of the Yarning
Circle, in MacNaughton Place, was chosen because it once marked the
“demarcation line” that blocked the Yaegl people’s access to the centre of
Maclean.
A director of the Yaegl
Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation, Dianne Chapman, said the line was
not something lost in the past.
“The significance of the
site is that a lot of our elders who have passed on would fish there,” Ms
Chapman said.
“They would come across
from Ulugundahi (Island). Because of that demarcation line they would have to
wait there until they got permission.
“Back in the old days
there used to be ‘dog tags’ they called them. They were cards that enabled
certain people, under the Aboriginal Protection Act, to go to places.
“Not everyone, just
certain people that they could give permission to do that.”
Ms Chapman said her
grandfather had been one of the people who the authorities at the time
entrusted with one of those cards.
“It wasn’t that far
away,” she said. “There’s a lot for the wider community to realise what
happened to Aboriginal people.”
Ms Chapman said the
yarning circle would give the local community a chance to catch up on the
region’s local heritage going back tens of thousands of years.
“It’s sad a lot of the
local community know more about Scottish people here than they do about
Aboriginal people,” she said.
She said the yarning
circle was somewhere Aboriginal people could meet to talk and reminisce and
share culture based on the spoken word.
“We are a culture based
on language and face-to-face contact,” she said. “This is how we connect to
each other and our land. It’s who we are.”
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